Daily Archives: November 12, 2008

You will remember the great excitement earlier this year when a 16mm copy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis turned up in Argentina, with scenes missing from existing 35mm prints. We await the outcome of whatever restoration will eventually bring those scenes to us, but now we hear of more on Metropolis from South America.

A 9.5mm print of the film has turned up in Chile, specifically at the Cinemateca de la Universidad de Chile. A report in the Ecuadorian newspaper El Telégrafo (never let it be said that The Bioscope does not search far and wide in its quest for the best news and information for you) says that the print was uncovered in 2006, though it had been in their vaults for years, but wasn’t immediately recognised as a priority. Now they have sent it to the folk at Murnau-Stiftung, which already has care of the Argentinian material.

We shouldn’t be throwing our hats up in the air over this one, as Pathé-Baby 9.5mm copies for the home market were generally cut-downs from full releases. In any case, no examination has been undertaken of the print, and it will be at least six months before we get any news concerning its contents, as the report states (you can get the drift of it through Google Translate’s English interpretation):

My thanks to regular Bioscopist David Pierce for bringing this to my attention, and acknowledgment to DVD Savant where he spotted it.

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Welcome to The Bioscope, a blog on early and silent cinema, with an emphasis on research. The Bioscope is no longer active, but you will find here nearly 1,400 posts on all aspects of silent film published from February 2007 to August 2012